Zane Grey
Zane Grey, born Pearl Zane Gray in 1872 in Zanesville, Ohio, was a prominent American novelist best known for his Western fiction. Initially trained as a dentist, Grey shifted his focus to writing during his time in New York City, where he published his first article in 1902 and completed his first novel, *Betty Zane*, in 1903. His literary career flourished after he began writing about the American West, inspired by his travels and friendships with figures like Colonel Charles Jesse "Buffalo" Jones. Grey's works, including *Riders of the Purple Sage*, became immensely popular, selling millions of copies and earning him a place as one of America's most successful writers of his time.
His storytelling often depicted the struggles of characters against the backdrop of the American frontier, addressing themes such as cattle drives, range wars, and the complexities of life in the West. While some critics considered his writing formulaic and sentimental, others praised the authenticity and detail of his Western settings. Grey's novels not only captured the spirit of the West but also reflected traditional American values and social concerns. He also wrote extensively about fishing, influencing later writers like Ernest Hemingway. Today, Grey’s legacy continues through adaptations of his work into films and his enduring popularity among fans of the Western genre.
Zane Grey
American novelist and dentist
- Born: January 31, 1872
- Birthplace: Zanesville, Ohio
- Died: October 23, 1939
- Place of death: Altadena, California
Biography
American-born novelist Pearl Zane Gray was born in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1872, to farmer and dentist Lewis and Alice (Zane) Gray. His mother traced her ancestry to a Danish Quaker who arrived in America with William Penn in 1682. She gave the name Pearl to her son, largely because of an admiration for Great Britain’s Queen Victoria, whose favorite color was pearl gray. After years of ribbing, Zane eventually dropped the “Pearl” altogether and changed “Gray” to the more English spelling.{$S[A]Gray, Pearl Zane;Grey, Zane}
He attended Zanesville schools, graduating from Moore High School and going on to the University of Pennsylvania on a baseball scholarship. He studied dentistry, graduating with a DDS degree in 1896.
From 1898 to 1904, he was a dentist in New York City. An avid fisherman all his life, he made frequent fishing trips to the Delaware River near Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, where he met his future wife, Lena Elise Roth, called Dolly. They married in 1905 and had two sons and a daughter.
He began writing while in New York, publishing an article, “A Day in Delaware,” in Recreation magazine in 1902. In 1903 he completed a historical novel, Betty Zane, based on an ancestor’s journal. It told of the Zane family’s role in settling the Ohio valley. He published it himself, to some critical success. Encouraged by this and his wife’s support, he moved to a cottage in Lackawaxen, to write full time.
In 1908 he traveled west in the company of frontiersman Colonel Charles Jesse “Buffalo” Jones. Along the way, Jones told him tales of the Old West. The West seemed to be the ideal setting for the kind of romantic stories Zane wanted to write. The frontier conditions were perfect for the struggles of the heroes he envisioned. With this exposure to the West, he wrote The Last of the Plainsmen, about Jones. It was rejected by Harper and Brothers, but they accepted his next Western novel, The Heritage of the Desert.
Harper also published Riders of the Purple Sage, selling a million copies and 800,000 reprints. The book’s success and Grey’s popularity with readers made him one of the most successful writers of his time. Twenty-five of his books sold seventeen million copies in twenty years, and except for the Bible and McGuffy’s Readers, they sold better than any others in US history. Many were made into films.
Grey’s popularity with readers was not always matched with critics. They called his work formulaic, melodramatic, sentimental, and stylistically awkward and stilted. They deplored his use of nineteenth century romance idiom and said he seemed unduly influenced by his childhood literary favorites, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826). They did, however, credit him for the authenticity and color of his Western settings and his stories’ promotion of traditional American values and concern for popular social change.
Grey wrote about most aspects of the American West, not just cowboys and Indians. His stories examined the animosity between cattlemen and sheepherders, the variegated Western vistas, cattle drives, gunslingers, range wars, the impact of the railroad and the telegraph on the way of life. He visited the places he wrote about and researched their history, giving authenticity and color to his books. Of his many books, the three most widely read since his death are Riders of the Purple Sage, The U.P. Trail, and The Vanishing American.
Riders of the Purple Sage sold millions of copies and was filmed four times: in 1918, with actor William Farnum; in 1925, with Tom Mix; in 1931, with George O’Brien; and in 1996, with Ed Harris (for television). Though some critics felt the book has too much scenery description, archaic diction and stilted dialogue, and is bigoted in its anti-Mormon sentiment, the gunman character Lassiter is considered one of Grey’s most interesting creations, the semi-outlaw hero.
The U.P. Trail, about the transcontinental railroad, was praised for its historical detail. Some critics found its plot melodramatic and found contradiction in its celebration of the railroad as a great achievement while condemning its detrimental consequences for American Indians. (Grey was sympathetic to Indians, claiming an Indian heritage through his great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth McCullough Zane.)
The Vanishing American has an Indian protagonist and describes the life of reservation Indians forced to deal with corrupt missionaries and Indian agents. Originally, its romance between the Indian hero and a white woman ended with their marriage. However, his publishers insisted he have the hero die before he can marry the woman. In 1982, an unexpurgated reprint returned the original ending.
Other less-known but worthy books include The Lone Star Ranger, which gives an unusual insight into a gunman’s psychology; To the Last Man, a sheepherder-cattleman feud as the basis for a Romeo-Juliet plot; Knights of the Range, with rare portrayals of an African American cowboy and Mexican women, albeit in disparagingly stereotypical way. (To the Last Man, filmed in 1933 and starring Randolph Scott, was Shirley Temple’s acting debut and also included a nude swimming scene.)
An avid fisherman, Grey also wrote nearly a dozen books about fishing. Some of his big-game fishing experiences are said to have inspired his friend Ernest Hemingway to write The Old Man and the Sea (1952). Grey, however, is best remembered for his Western novels. It wasn’t until the 1950s that the work of another writer of Westerns, Louis L’Amour, began to surpass him in sales. Though Grey’s characters may seem stereotypical today, their struggles with moral issues and their personal weaknesses make engrossing reading for the fan of the Western tale, of which there are more with each new generation.
Author Works
Long Fiction:
Betty Zane, 1903
The Spirit of the Border: A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley, 1906
The Last of the Plainsmen, 1908
The Last Trail: A Story of Early Days in the Ohio Valley, 1909
The Heritage of the Desert, 1910
Riders of the Purple Sage, 1912
Desert Gold, 1913
The Light of the Western Stars, 1913
The Lone Star Ranger, 1915
The Rainbow Trail, 1915
The Border Legion, 1916
Wildfire, 1917
The U.P. Trail, 1918
The Desert of Wheat, 1918
The Man of the Forest, 1920
The Mysterious Rider, 1921
To the Last Man, 1922
The Day of the Beast, 1922
Wanderer of the Wasteland, 1923
Call of the Canyon, 1924
The Thundering Herd, 1925
The Vanishing American, 1925
Under the Tonto Rim, 1926 (previously serialized as The Bee Hunter, 1925)
Forlorn River, 1927
Valley of Wild Horses, 1927, 1947
Stairs of Sand, 1928
Wild Horse Mesa, 1928
“Nevada”: A Romance of the West, 1928
Don: The Story of a Lion Dog, 1928
Fighting Caravans, 1929
The Shepherd of Guadaloupe, 1930
The Sunset Pass, 1931
Robber’s Roost, 1932
Arizona Ames, 1932
Wyoming, 1932, 1953
The Drift Fence, 1932
The Mysterious Rider, 1933
The Hash Knife Outfit, 1933
Code of the West, 1934
Thunder Mountain, 1935
The Trail Driver, 1936
The Lost Wagon Train, 1936
West of the Pecos, 1937
Majesty’s Rancho, 1938
Raiders of Spanish Peaks, 1938
Knights of the Range, 1939
Western Union, 1939
30,000 on the Hoof, 1940
Twin Sombreros, 1930
Wilderness Trek, 1944
Shadow on the Trail, 1946
Rogue River Feud, 1948
The Deer Stalker, 1949
The Maverick Queen, 1950
The Dude Ranger, 1951
Captives of the Desert, 1952
Lost Pueblo, 1954
Black Mesa, 1955
Stranger from the Tonto, 1956
The Fugitive Trail, 1957
The Arizona Clan, 1958
Horse Heaven Hill, 1959
Boulder Dam, 1963
The Reef Girl, 1977
George Washington, Frontiersman, 1994
Last of the Duanes: A Western Story, 1996
Rangers of the Lone Star, 1997
Woman of the Frontier: A Western Story, 1998
The Great Trek: A Frontier Story, 1999
Open Range: A Western Story, 2002
The Desert Crucible: A Western Story, 2003
Shower of Gold: A Western Story, 2007
Dorn of the Mountains: A Western Story, 2008
Union Pacific: A Western Story, 2009
Desert Heritage: A Western Story, 2010
Buffalo Stampede: A Western Story, 2011
War Comes to the Big Bend : A Western Story, 2012
The Water Hole: A Western Story, 2014
Color of the West: A Western Story, 2015
Panguitch: A Western Story, 2016
Short Fiction:
Tappan’s Burro and Other Stories, 1923
The Ranger, and Other Stories, 1960
Blue Feather, and Other Stories, 1961
Amber's Mirage and Other Stories, 1983
The Secret of Quaking Asp Cabin and Other Stories, 1983
The Camp Robber, and Other Stories, 1990
Silvermane, and Other Stories, 1991
The Westerners: Frontier Stories, 2000
Nonfiction:
Tales of Fishes, 1919
Tales of Lonely Trails, 1922
Tales of Southern Rivers, 1924
Tales of Fishing Virgin Seas, 1925
Tales of the Angler’s Eldorado, New Zealand, 1926
Tales of Swordfish and Tuna, 1927
Tales of Fresh-Water Fishing, 1928
Tales of Tahitian Waters, 1931
Zane Grey’s Book of Camps and Trails, 1931
An American Angler in Australia, 1937
Zane Grey’s Adventures in Fishing, 1952 (Ed Zern , editor)
Tales from a Fisherman's Log, 1978
Dolly & Zane Grey: Letters from a Marriage, 2008 (Candace C. Kant, editor)
Children’s/Young Adult Literature:
The Short Stop, 1909
The Young Forester, 1910
The Young Pitcher, 1911
The Young Lion Hunter, 1911
Ken Ward in the Jungle, 1912
The Red-Headed Outfield, and Other Baseball Stories, 1920
The Wolf Tracker, 1930
King of the Royal Mounted and the Northern Treasure, 1936
King of the Royal Mounted and the Ghost Guns of Roaring River, 1946
The Adventures of Finspot, 1974
Bibliography
Farley, G. M. Zane Grey, A Documented Portrait: The Man, the Bibliography, the Filmography. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: Portals Press, 1986. Slender biography includes bibliography.
Flora, Joseph M. “Grey, Zane.” In Twentieth Century American Literature, edited by James Vinson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980. Contains a comprehensive listing of Grey’s novels and other works plus a brief essay discussing aspects of his career and critical evaluations of his writing style.
“Grey, Zane.” In Twentieth Century Authors, edited by Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1942. Interesting biographical details and career statistics.
Jackson, Carlton. “Grey, Zane.” In American National Biography, edited by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. Vol. 9. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Detailed essay about Grey’s personal life.
Nesbitt, John D. “Grey, Zane.” In Twentieth Century Western Writers, edited by James Vinson. Detroit: Gale, 1982. Lists Grey’s novels with original American and English publishers. Essay critiques several novels’ strengths and weaknesses.
Pauly, Thomas H. Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. The first full-length biography of Grey, essential for research into the man and his work.